More generally, the question can be stated as, "Is such-and-such-plugin already loaded for this user?" In Bash, I was able to come up with the following command to check for the existence of the g:loaded_pathogen variable. Unfortunately, the command did not seem to work in C Shell, so I had to wrap it in a small script. #!/bin/bash vim -c ':exec ":silent !echo ".exists("g:loaded_pathogen") | exec ":q!"' The script sends either 0 or 1 (plus mystery terminal control sequences) to stdout. I suspect there is a cleaner way to do this but, for now, this is all I've got: